Thursday, March 31, 2016

Coming after The
Serpent’s Tooth, the thirteenth episode in the story of Walt Longmire,
Wyoming county sheriff, Spirit of
Steamboat, (Viking, 2013) is neither a novel nor a short story (the saga
hitherto has been told in nine novels and three short stories). Author Craig
Johnson says that it started out as a short story but outgrew that form, not,
however, reaching the status of full-blown novel. It’s a novella.

Episode 13

It’s an aviation story, and a return to the
time when Walt had just become sheriff. Wife Martha is still alive and daughter
Cady just a child. Walt’s predecessor Lucian Connolly is more active than in
the later books, though still legless. Lucian was apparently a pilot in the
Second World War and flew bombers over Japan. Now (Christmas Eve 1988) there is
a little Japanese girl who has suffered terrible burns and she needs to get to
hospital in Denver urgently. But there’s a humdinger of a storm moving rapidly
down from Canada and emergency helicopters can’t fly. In fact nothing can,
except maybe a geriatric B25 that had been used by General Eisenhower. And that
was exactly the aircraft that Lucian used to fly.

Steamboat was a Wyoming bucking bronc at the turn of the 20th century, a horse
that couldn’t be ridden, and it is an appropriate name for an airplane which
will lurch and twist in the high winds all the way down into Colorado. Steamboat’s
story didn’t end well, though: the horse fell victim to blood poisoning caused
by some old barbed wire and the poor beast was shot with a rifle. The airplane
named for him fares slightly better.

Gary Holt on Steamboat, Laramie, 1903

The doc, Isaac Bloomfield, goes along to
nurse the child and he performs heroically on the flight to keep the girl
alive. The patient’s Japanese grandmother is also there. Walt is needed up in
the cockpit to pump a handle to keep the hydraulic pressure up but has to crawl
back now and then to act as nurse to the surgeon.

As with all Longmire stories, there is
an Old West tinge to it despite the modern setting. The eccentric (and
bibulous) Lucian is described and Johnson says “Slim Pickens
as pilot. We were doomed.” The gun that was used to put down Steamboat, we are
told, once belonged to Tom
Horn. When the doc has no surgical equipment and must improvise, he says he
is going to “get western”.

Well, there’s much danger and excitement
before they reach Denver and Lucian gets there on a wing and a prayer.

A B25

There are occasional infelicities of
style. Mr. Johnson is one of those who believes that off is not adequate as a preposition but must have an of added to it: “…some wiseacre had hung
an old keychain of the state emblem off of the yellow escape hatch…” We also
get, “I wondered at the turn of the fates that would put a hurt Japanese child
in such a beast like Steamboat”. These are exceptions. Generally, the English
is sound and the style literate.

Craig Johnson. Nice hat.

Like all the Longmire stories, this one
is enjoyable. It can pretty well be read in a sitting, or two anyway. Next in
the series came Any Other Name, a
full novel, in 2014, which we will read another day.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Made-for-TV Westerns in the 1970s were
not often very good. It was pre-Lonesome
Dove and major big-budget miniseries were still to come. Studios with
TV company spin-offs thought they could get viewers by cheaply remaking some
classics from their back catalogue, with minor stars. True Grit got the treatment in 1978.

The 1968
novel by Charles Portis was so splendid and the 1969
movie with John Wayne so fine that it was inevitable that a TV version in
the 1970s would be doomed to derision. And indeed, reviews have been pretty
well universally bad. Even John Wayne’s own big-screen attempt at a sequel in 1975, Rooster Cogburn, had none of the magic
of the novel or the ’69 film, and a small-screen treatment a couple of years
later wasn’t going to fare better.

The TV version had an indifferent
director in Richard T Heffron, and writer Canadian Sandor Stern was no
Marguerite Roberts – and he hadn’t even the original novel to adapt, for two of
the characters (Rooster and Mattie) are the only link. And a major weakness of
the TV movie was Lisa Pelikan as Mattie. It wasn’t so much her age (she was 24,
playing a sixteen-year-old girl) for after all Kim Darby had been 22 (and a
mother) when she played the teenager in 1969. Nor was it Ms. Pelikan’s part,
for screenwriter Stern had made an attempt at Portis-ish dialogue for her. It
was her delivery. She spoke the words unconvincingly, sometimes gobbled and too often shouted.
Furthermore, she had pure 1970s hair of a Farrah Fawcett Charlie’s Angels kind and 70s cosmetics to match.

Warren as Rooster but a poor Mattie

Still and all, despite all these obvious
failings, I will say that Warren Oates was pretty damn good as Rooster. He has
a Jeff Bridges look about him and I wonder if Mr. Bridges had taken him as a
model almost more than he did Wayne when he was Rooster in the Coen brothers’ True
Grit in 2010.

Bridges as Rooster, 2010

It was actually Oates’s last Western. He’d been a
mainstay of TV oaters since 1958 and of course was taken up by Sam
Peckinpah. By 1978 he was still only fifty but then the ‘real’ Rooster was
only in his forties; it was only John Wayne that makes us think of him as
an older man. Anyway, bearded Oates does a good job in this TV version and
makes a memorable cantankerous curmudgeon.

Both big-screen True Grits benefited from fine locations and cinematography and
while this TV one was certainly not in the Lucien
Ballard class, it was shot around Buckskin Joe in Colorado, by Stevan
Larner of Badlands and Twilight Zone fame (this and another TV
movie were his only Westerns). There’s nice snowy scenery, and South Pass City (the
story is set in Wyoming) looks pretty good.

There’s a rancher (Lee Meriwether,
rather too glam and soft-complexioned to be a Wyoming widow living a life of
hardship) who has three young sons who want to fly the nest (James Stephens,
Jeff Osterhage, Lee Montgomery, all OK, I guess). Reuben takes them under his
wing, reluctantly, as they sign on to guard a gold shipment from bandits. That’s
pretty well the plot. Mattie (who has both arms in working order) tags along,
annoyingly. Rooster is supposed to be escorting her to her grandfather in
California because her mother has now died and she is an orphan but Rooster has
gambled away the money Lawyer Daggett had given him for the purpose and so he
needs a job.

The title was pretty dumb. True grit is
a quality and it can’t have a further adventure. There’s a bridge in South Pass
City that looks very like the one Keith Carradine got shot off in McCabe
& Mrs. Miller. One of the outlaws is named Henry Bast but his
wanted poster reads Henery Bast. Rooster has a pepperbox derringer
which comes in handy. There’s a cabin and an ultimatum lifted from 1969.

Well, well, people have been dismissive of this
movie, and with some justification, but it isn’t as bad as all that and if it
comes on, you could watch it.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

He was born at the turn of the twentieth
century and brought up on a ranch near Helena, Montana, where he learned roping
and riding. As a youth he had a job driving a tourist bus in Yellowstone
National Park. Tall and rangy, and handsome too, with a deep drawl, he
started stunting and as an extra in silent Westerns in Hollywood, then
Paramount noticed him and groomed him for stardom. Sound familiar? You may well
think I am writing about Gary Cooper, but I am in fact talking about Lane
Chandler.

Vaguely Gary Cooperish

Chandler, born 1899, died 1972, was, for
a brief moment, a cowboy star. But his career followed the opposite path to
Coop’s: he never really made the transition from silents to talkies, and he had
to take ever-smaller roles until he was reduced to uncredited bit parts and,
later, TV. Sad, really, because in many ways he had what it takes.

Willis Kent was an independent producer
who made cheap silent and talkie Westerns in the 1930s. He often used as
director JP McGowan, one of those who could churn out low-grade pictures on
time and under budget without caring too much if they were any good (mostly they
weren’t). By 1930 Lane Chandler was reduced to working for Kent and McGowan (at
least he had top billing; he would have further to fall). He made six Westerns
in 1932 and five in ’33. Lawless Valley
(which would be remade by RKO in 1938 with George O’Brien in the lead) was a
1934 effort.

JP McGowan

McGowan directed it and also appeared as
the chief heavy (an economical measure). The story tells of a young Texas
lawman (Chandler) hired by a stockmen’s association and come north, to Wyoming
perhaps (it is not specified) to track down the notorious rustler El Lobo (McGowan)
who heads up a gang of cut-throats in a canyon guarded by a narrow pass.

The direction was poor and the pace very
uneven. Scenes of rustlers driving cattle go on far too long and key action
moments are rushed. Continuity and editing were very weak. Of course it was the
early 1930s and acting was pretty wooden and false by modern standards. The Oliver
Drake script was just as wooden – at one point McGowan announces that they must
chase the hero. “We’ll head him off at the pass!” he yells. Yup, it’s that
corny.

Still, for early 30s B-Western corn, it
isn’t that bad. Chandler isn’t Coop
but in certain lights he looks a little like him and his voice isn’t a million
miles away. (Chandler appeared in a couple of early Cooper Westerns so maybe he
learned something). He was athletic and good at scrambling over rocks and so
forth. He has rather silly dude chaps but they all did then. He has one of
those tiresome clever horses, Raven, that comes when he whistles and unties his
master, freeing him from the tree where he had been bound and left by the
cruel-hearted villain.

Good opening shot of the hero

Big Mike, aka El Lobo, is a tough boss
but strangely democratic, leaving every significant decision to a vote by his
henchmen. This tendency leads to his downfall when said henchpersons elect stocky
and unshaven thug Bull Lemoyne (Dick Cramer, rather good by 1930s standards) to
replace him. There’s a Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader moment when (spoiler alert) it transpires
that El Lobo is the hero’s dad. Father and son end up fighting the gang together and Mr.
Lobo sacrifices himself to save his boy in a way that involves dynamite.

The several fistfights are scrappy
inelegant scuffles, as they tended to be in early Westerns, rather than the
more balletic (and choreographed) free-swinging punching affairs they became later.

There’s a damsel for the hero to fall
for, Rosita (former child actress Gertrude Messinger in cupid’s bow lipstick) and
Lane duly does. He is greatly helped by Gertie’s amusing old-timer pop Zeb (Si
Jenks) who sides with his daughter and her lover.

Well, all’s well that, as you may
imagine, ends well, and Lane gets to ride off into the sunset with Gertie.
Sadly, a slowly declining career awaited him over the horizon and who now
remembers Lane Chandler? Sic transit gloria
mundi occidentali.

Friday, March 25, 2016

A few weeks ago on this blog I wrote a review
of an Audie Murphy Western, The Quick Gun,
and a kind reader, Boppa, left a comment to say that The Quick Gun was in fact a remake of a Jim Davis Western of only
four years before. I didn’t know that, so I sought out the original and watched
it, and can now tell you about Noose for
a Gunman.

The
Quick Gun was pretty well a straight remake; the
story and even some of the dialogue (Robert E Kent and Steve Fisher) are the
same. Noose is in black & white
while the remake was in color but the original can hold its head up – it is as
least as good as the Murphy vehicle in my estimation. There are a few small
differences: the hero does not meet up with the bandit leader before hitting
town in Noose, and there is no plot
device of coming back to reclaim daddy’s farm. Case Britton (Davis) is the
gunman rather than Clint Cooper (Murphy) in the Columbia picture. The sheriff
is not the hero’s rival for the hand of the fair maid in the first movie. But
these are minor tweaks. And the gang boss (Cantrell/Spangler) is played by the
excellent heavy Ted de Corsia in both!

Jim is the gunslinger the town wants to hang

In fact as far as the cast goes, I would
say honors are even. Davis is the equal of Murphy as the gunman who wants to
hang up his irons and settle down with his true love. The part of the ruthless town
boss is stronger in Noose and is
excellently played by Barton MacLane, Western heavy par excellence, so that gives the edge to Noose, and what’s more, Leo Gordon the Great is his principal henchman,
Link Roy, a huge plus. But on the other hand James Best is better as the
sheriff in The Quick Gun (Walter
Sande in Noose is solid but no more)
and the Murphy picture also benefits from good old Frank Ferguson as the heroine’s
dad, a figure absent from Noose. But
the ally of the hero in Noose is
Harry Carey Jr., so you pays your money and you takes your choice. One thing I
will say, Merry Anders as the gunman’s intended in The Quick Gun was much superior to Lyn Thomas in Noose; Thomas was a poor actress.

Leo was beaten up in fistfights in pretty well ever Western he was in. In reality, he would have been the one doing the beating up.

Edward L Cahn directed Noose. A former editor (he had worked on
the 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front),
he knew about pace and building tension. An imperturbable pipe-smoker, he would
quietly turn his hand to every genre under the sun, including Westerns, starting
with the famous Law andOrder of
1932.

De Corsia is Cantrell, brigand chief,
and we find many bandits with this moniker or a similar one in Westerns - take for example Walter Pidgeon's Cantrell in Dark Command. This
Cantrell is said to be an ex-Confederate guerrilla leader and of course the
Western movie model is William Quantrill or Quantrell (1837 – 65). Ted is great,
though, and plays the part with gusto – in both movies.

The opening shots of Noose are classic as the notorious
gunman rides into town watched fearfully by the townsfolk. The gunman’s brother
used to be marshal but was killed by Barton MacLane’s no-good sons, said sons being then
dispatched by Jim. It’s a Wyoming setting: Rock Valley is between Casper and
Laramie (Rock River is between those two towns today so maybe Rock Valley is
that). It was filmed up on the Iverson Ranch in California, though, so it’s not
that Wyomingish.

Good gunslinger hero Davis faces off with bad guys Maclane and Gordon

Jim and his lady love, the couple now
espoused, set off in a buggy in the final reel, in High Noon style. Jim doesn’t want to be marshal of Rock Valley full
time, thank you very much. Well, who can blame him, for the townspeople were
pretty mean to him. They kept a noose waiting just for him. But anyway Jim wants to hang up his guns and farm. His wife spent most
of the film trying to persuade him not to do what a man’s gotta do, in true
Western-movie tradition, though, also High
Noonishly, she intervened (with an eight-gauge) to save her fiancé during the
three-way Ted/Jim/Leo final gunfight – which is rather good, in fact.

Above him, hanging from the tree, is the eponymous noose

Decidedly, Noose for a Gunman is not the poor relation of this pair of movies
and I would recommend either or both to you. I may have been ever so slightly generous with the revolver rating on this one but well, with Leo Gordon and Harry Carey Jr. in it, what you gonna do?

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Gallowwalkers starts with a rape and a decapitation, so is not for children or
the squeamish. It has a distinctly spaghetti tone to it and is an example of
what is fast becoming a genre, twenty-first century post-spaghettis which
border on the pastiche (see for example Sukiyaki Western Django orDjango Unchained).
But it is also a horror movie. We’ve had Cowboys & Aliens: now we get Cowboys & Zombies (horror adepts tell me there
is a difference between the undead and zombies but I’m afraid I’m not aware of
it). There are also echoes of Mad Maxery.
It looks as though it was filmed in Spain, in the best spag tradition, though
in fact it was shot in Namibia (in 2006). It was a big-budget affair.

It stars, in his only Western,
action-man Wesley Snipes, the sole actor in the cast whose name I knew, as a Clintish
taciturn lone gunman. Wesley is nice to his horse so is obviously a goody, as
far as goodiness goes in these pictures. In the best spag tradition, he seems
to be bent on revenge but he also seems to be cursed by the devil, or someone.
Anyone he kills comes back to life, which must be inconvenient for a
gunslinger. Snipes occasionally lapses into anachronistic modern urban
street-talk, which is off-putting, but generally manages OK.

There are strange red-robed armed clergymen
who arrive on a railroad push cart. They have their lips sewn together for some
odd reason, though they are able to mutter. Other characters have no skin
(though they sometimes borrow other people’s). It’s all rather odd.

The movie was directed and co-written by
the rather splendidly named Andrew Goth, about whom I know nothing. The
direction of Gallowwalkers is patchy,
though, and it’s one of those films where you have to pretty well guess what
the plot is, and your guess could be as good (or bad) as the next guy’s.

The women are all saucily-dressed, and
just sex objects, as they were in spaghetti westerns. It’s unpleasant in that
way.

You feel that the second w in the title ought to have been
capitalized, even though the words are run together but for me it’s an
entertaining illustration of how in English a plural noun becomes singular when
used as a pre-positioned adjective, in the same way that you can have scissor-sharpeners
or a trouser pocket. The posters used all-caps to get round the issue. But
anyway, where was I?

Monday, March 21, 2016

Sukiyaki
Western Django is a way cool, 21st century
spaghetti Western in the Quentin Tarantino mold. In fact Mr. Tarantino seems to
be the godfather of the picture and appears in it as the lantern-jawed gunman/narrator in a poncho.

Quentin is MC

The movie is bloody, garish and has a derivative plot, there are stretches of
tedium between the over-the-top action, and it has lousy dialogue, so in these
respects it is pure spaghetti. But it’s spaghetti (sukiyaki is a Japanese foodstuff in the same way spaghetti is in Italy) in that knowing modern way,
with plenty of references for the Western fan to pick up on, a pastiche
perhaps, even a parody, or, if you are being generous, a homage.

Eastern Western (or Western Eastern)

It’s yet another Yojimbo story and in a way that is fitting because that theme is
archetypal of the spaghetti genre. A lone gunman comes to a town dominated by
two criminal gangs and vacillates between the two. Carnage is the inevitable
outcome. Of course Sergio Leone got into legal hot water for making A Fistful of Dollars (though I bet he
made enough fistfuls to pay off his lawyers) because he did not credit or seek
the permission of Akira Kurosawa, who had made the same story, as Yojimbo, in 1961. It was in many ways a
ridiculous quarrel (“culture theft”, how absurd) because Kurosawa himself was
more than a little influenced by American sources and if you read Dashiell
Hammett’s The Glass Key of 1931 (or
see the subsequent film noir) you will
see how. The story has flitted back and forth between America, Japan and Italy,
and doubtless other countries too, and why should it not?

Hideaki Itô as Clintish gunman with no name

The film was directed and co-written by
Takashi Miike, an alumnus of the cranked-out straight-to-video pulp genre in
Japan who broke through into trendy mainstream pictures, often containing much
violence and sex, and developed what is known as a cult following (code for
making trashy as well as entertaining films). Mr. Miike is probably an auteur, heaven help us. He speaks no
English yet decided to have his actors (including Tarantino) do the picture in ‘English’,
a phonetically rendered screenplay that sounds always bizarre and often
unintelligible, perhaps in reference to the shocking dubbing of many Italian
Westerns. I was reduced to watching it with subtitles, and as I live in France and
dear old Netflix, in its wisdom, only gives me the choice of French subtitles
or none, I watched a Japanese film in English with subtitles in French, a
slightly odd experience. Still, I needed the subtitles and, I suggest, if you
watch this movie you will too (preferably in your own language). It sounds
especially weird when the actors use American colloquialisms.

Takashi Miike

The story is either set in a very
Japanese-looking Nevada or a very American-West kind of Japan (it was shot in
Yamagata, Japan). The characters have samurai swords and 1960s gunbelts and
Colts, and they wear robes and dusters, and headbands and Stetsons.

Swords v Colts

There is
some use of stylized painted backdrops. A very saturated yellow coloration
dominates, perhaps a reference to the lurid colors of 1960s Italian Westerns. ‘Musical’
whistling tells us it’s a spaghetti (as if we hadn’t guessed) and there are
those stupid phew-phew noises when they
twirl guns or holster them. The two gangs who infest the town are the reds and
the whites, and there are several references to the Wars of the Roses in
fifteenth-century England. In fact the boss of the reds, Taira no Kiyomori - apparently the characters were named after actual historical figures in the Tale of the Heike - (Koichi Sato) decides that henceforth
he will be known as Henry in honor of Henry VI.

There’s a little boy born of a Romeo & Juliet-ish love match
between a red and a white. The reds remind us of the gang of thugs in Django and later we see a casket towed
in the mud with a cross on it (the rather unJapanese cross symbol is used a lot
in the movie, and the cross that finally impales the unfortunate sheriff bears
the name Mercedes Zaro, as the one in Django
did) – and of course the coffin contains a machine gun. We all know how keen
Quentin was on Django (five years
later his own tribute, Django Unchained,
appeared). Sukiyaki Western Django is
as much Corbucci as it is Leone. But there are also geeky references to Rambo and The Quick and the Dead (the hole shot through the middle of a character).

The pusillanimous sheriff

There’s a Japanese degüello played by a lone trumpeter, and the Clintish no-name ‘hero’
(Hideaki Itô) announces that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Mr. Miike
has obviously seen a Western or two. The saloon is called Eastwood’s. There’s a
dwarf (hope that’s an acceptable word; not sure). One character has a saddle
roll of guns like Colonel Mortimer. There’s a Djangoesque cemetery. The red boss wears a protective breastplate.
There’s certainly no shortage of spag references. Even more happily, a derringer
figures in the last reel, so that put the picture up in my estimation.

Yüsuku Iseye is leader of the whites

It all ends with Japanese djangly music and we are told that the
little boy goes off to Italy when he grows up and becomes Django.

Sukiyaki Western Django is quite fun, even for
spaghetti-loathers, and it does repay a watch, if you like gory pastiche. But it
does rather labor the point, I think. It’s 121 minutes long and, for me, the joke wore
off well before the end.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Tim Holt’s Westerns for RKO were quite
fun. Most were juvenile programmers and as such hardly great art but they had a
certain zip about them. Holt had a youthful appearance and a winning smile (as
he and his partner Chito run a stageline in Arizona we must assume that the
film’s title applies to him). His first appearance in an RKO Western was as the
Tonto Kid in The Law West of Tombstone
(in which he was second billed after Harry Carey). His first RKO Western lead
was as the Fargo Kid in the movie of the same name in 1940. One look at his
boyish face will tell you why he got ‘kid’ roles. All through the 1940s the
entertaining (if innocuous) Westerns came thick and fast.

Tim Holt

Occasionally he did a more serious film:
he worked twice for John Ford, as the young cavalry lieutenant in Stagecoach in 1939 and as Virgil Earp in
My Darling Clementine in 1946. Most notably
he showed that he could really act in a serious picture when he was Curtin, one
of the gold seekers, for John Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948. But he will be mostly remembered for
his black & white hour-long second-feature oaters, especially those in
which his sidekick was Chito Jose Gonzalez Bustamante Rafferty (Richard
Martin), the amorous swain who, however, runs a mile whenever matrimony looms.
And indeed, these Westerns are fun.

It probably satisfied the juvenile audience in '49

Sadly, though, Stagecoach Kid was one of the weakest of them. It followed the same
plotline as usual, i.e. Tim and Chito foil a skullduggerous plot with much
gallopin’ and shootin’, but it seemed to lack the usual get up and go. This may
be because the director was Lew Landers. Usually Holt had Edward Killy or
Lesley Selander at the helm, both more than competent, but Landers hadn’t got
the same ability. He was one of those directors known for churning out
programmers on time and on budget without much interest in whether they were
any good.

You'd be better off with another in the series

Stagecoach
Kid was quite unusual in that at the end Tim got
the girl. He didn’t usually. Chito flirted with them but Tim remained chaste.
But in the last reel of this one he has Jessie on his arm and married bliss
beckons. Jessie was played by Jeff Donnell, who, unlike me, took her first name
from 50% of the duo with Mutt in the cartoon strip. Apparently she was besotted
with the characters. She specialized in tomboy or bobbysoxer parts and indeed,
in Stagecoach Kid she dresses up as a
boy (most unconvincingly) and calls herself Jesse James. All the cowpokes
around are fooled by the rambunctious youth (they must have been seriously
dumb) and it gives Tim the chance to spank her, daringly, which Hollywood
loved. Later, though, she is unmasked and changes back to a dress and rides
sidesaddle.

A myopic Tim with 'Jesse'

Her dad is a rich businessman from San
Francisco (Thurston Hall) who has brought his daughter out to Arizona to a
ranch he owns to get her away from an unsuitable suitor. She is a spoiled brat.
However, crooked ranch foreman Thatcher (reliable heavy Joe Sawyer) and his
henchmen Parnell and Clint (Robert Williams and Robert Bray) have taken over
the hacienda and drunk all the whiskey and smoked all the cigars, not to
mention sold off the cattle. They want to kill the owner before he arrives and
discovers the naughtiness but the henchmen are singularly incompetent and every
attempt fails (mostly foiled by Tim & Chito).

Tim and Chito nab a villain

Kenneth MacDonald is the sheriff and
Harry Harvey is the clerk of the stageline, so that’s all good. The music is by
Paul Sawtell so that’s OK too. But honestly, I wouldn’t bother. Try Guns of Hate instead. Or better still, Rustlers - that one has a derringer in a cake.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

I still like Tex Ritter Westerns. Sad, I
know. He was a bad actor and not even that good a singer, though OK in an
old-fashioned sort of way. His pictures are almost exclusively corny. And yet…
they take me back to a happy time when I, along with, I suspect, 99% of my
fellow boys, were less demanding and less perceptive, when it wasn’t corn but
dash and excitement. Riders of the
Rockies is a classic example, fifty-six minutes of fun.

Grand National only existed from 1936 to
’39. Originally designed as a distributor of B-movies, like Monogram, it
started producing its own. Founder Edward Alperson invented the distinctive
clock logo.

The studio made a series of cheap Westerns with singing cowboys (and singing cowgirl Dorothy Page). It even made the occasional film in color (‘Hirlicolor’) but Riders of the Rockies wasn’t one of them.

Ritter’s first dozen Westerns were for
Grand National (he switched to Monogram in 1938). They had similar plots,
pretty well the same crew, and the cast was mighty familiar by the end of the
series too. Riders was directed, as
many of them were, by RN Bradbury the Great (Bob Steele’s dad), a veteran
virtuoso of the B-Western, who also churned out oaters for Monogram. Riders also credits Lindsley Parsons as ‘supervisor’:
Parsons, another a Monogram regular, was a big fish in the small pond of Poverty Row B-Westerns; as writer,
director or producer he was involved in 80 oaters, big screen and little, from the
John Wayne vehicle Sagebrush Trail in
1933 to the Sonny & Cher epic Western Good
Times of 1967. I don’t know what he supervised on Riders of the Rockies. Did he tell Robert Bradbury what to do? I
doubt it.

RN Bradbury (right) with son Bob Steele

We first see Tex riding with his pards,
three abreast and singing, obviously – a helpful song which introduces the
actors: Tex’s two sidekicks, both comic, are plump Doc (Horace Murphy) and
handlebar-mustached Pee-Wee (Snub Pollard – who in later Grand National Westerns
of this kind was demoted to bit parts as Al St. John took over sidekicking). Tex
is far more dashing than they are in his dudish outfit and on second-billed
star White Flash. His Stetson is even whiter and flashier than his horse,
though.

Fifty-six minutes of fun

The three are Arizona Rangers, and
Hollywood liked Arizona Rangers, as such pictures as Arizona
Rangerswith Audie Murphy and The
Arizona Ranger with Tim Holt showed. I don’t know why on earth this one
was named Riders of the Rockies
because it is set on the unrocky Arizona/Mexico border, filmed in Western
California and nary a Rockie appears, but never mind. The title has a ring to
it (and permits Tex & Co to sing a song about the Rockies in which Rangers
rhymes with danger).

The best thing about the picture is that
Earl Dwire, my hero, is the chief villain, Jeff. Dwire usually did solid
mustached sheriffs in suits but this time he lets rip as head of a gang of
rustlers and is splendid in his black hat. Naturally there’s a one-on-one
showdown with Tex in the last reel, and no prizes for guessing who wins it, but
while bossing the badmen around Earl is excellent. His chief henchman is the unshaven
thug Butch Regan (Charles King, jowly villain of countless B-Westerns who had
started way back on TheBirth of a Nation in 1915). Briefly
glimpsed as a minor henchman is Hank Worden, already in his eleventh Western –
he did several of these Grand National ones with Tex. The gang’s base of
operations is a cantina south of the border, filled with Mexicans in straw
sombreros and a dancer who shows a daring amount of ankle.

Earl Dwire, rustlers' boss

Yakima Canutt has an unusually big
speaking part as well as doing the stunts. He plays Ranger Sergeant Beef, who
takes an instant dislike to Tex and his pals. I was convinced he would turn out
to be a badman in cahoots with the rustlers, because, well, it's Yak, but nay, he was just a Ranger.
Still, it’s Canutt so he can’t help looking pretty frightening and badguyish. Tex
and the Tornadoes sing quite a nice Home
on the Range six minutes in but Yak says they sound like coyotes. How rude.

There’s a heroine, of course, Louise
(played by Louise Stanley, 15 Westerns 1937 - 44, all B), who first appears in standard 1930s dress on the
stagecoach which bandits chase in the first reel and which is saved by the three
pards. Why was it that in these Westerns the cowboys all wore nineteenth century
range duds but the gal always wore a contemporary dress? Most odd. Oh well. Louise
later takes a job in the cantina as a singer (a pretty awful one in fact) and
wears a gown that Carmen Miranda would have thought over-the-top. What on
earth this rather proper damsel is doing singing in a ratty saloon south of the
border in a tart’s dress is anyone’s guess. I thought she would turn out to be a
secret government agent but no, she’s just a bad singer in a worse dress. Never
mind.

Pretty in her 1930s outfit

The rustlers frame Doc and Pee-Wee, who
are imprisoned as spies for the rustlers. Most unfair. Tex ‘deserts’ and
crosses the border to seek out the cantina and pretend to join the gang, in
order to bust up their game and prove his pards innocent. Once in the cantina
we see that he has changed his Stetson to a gray one – well, he couldn’t
actually wear a black hat, he’s Tex
Ritter, but he is pretending to be a badman so he wears a gray one.

Tex sings out on the range

Tex rescues a captain of Rurales (Martin
Garralaga) who becomes his friend for life and it’s the Rurales (goodies) who
ride to the rescue at the end, not the Rangers.

There are stampedes with speeded up
film. The good thing about these pictures was that you could use stock footage
(in more ways than one) from any old silent movie, dub on a few moos and Bob Bradbury’s
your uncle. There’s a fistfight in the cantina between Tex and Butch, also
speeded-up. There’s an exciting climax with much shooting and horse chasing. At
the end the villains are brought to book (no spoiler here) and Tex and his pals
ride off into the sunset, singing, natch. But now they are four – for Louise
rides alongside. Alperson’s Grand National clock signals The End, and a good
time was had by all, including your e-pal,